Always Back to Her
by aaronlisa
Summary: All of his roads always lead him back to her door. Erica/Kai


Characters: Kai Booker, Erica Strange, Dr Tom, Dr Arthur, Dr Naadiah, Dr Fred. Adam Fitzpatrick

Pairings: Erica/Kai, Erica/Adam

Disclaimer: _Being Erica_ belongs to Temple Street Productions and company.

Prompts: Written for Yuletide 2010 for outcomewolves who requested the pairing.

Notes: This contains spoilers for both Season Two and Season Three of _Being Erica_ with some speculation of what could happen in the future.

There's a part of her heart that's breaking when Kai looks at her with no recognition in his familiar eyes. It's still Kai but he's not her Kai, the one that she was starting to feel something for. That Kai has gone back to his own time and now she's left with a Kai who has no regrets right now. There's a part of Erica that wants to wrap him up in her arms and keep him safe from what the future holds for him but she can't. Instead she puts on a bright smile and tells him how much she loved his song. For a brief moment, there's a spark of something in his eyes, almost recognition but it's gone and then Kai's gone too.

"You need to forget her Kai," Dr Fred patiently tells him. "Erica Strange is off limits to you."

Kai sighs in frustration as he runs a hand through his hair. "You don't understand it."

"Do you honestly think that you're the only patient who's fallen for another patient like you did with Erica?"

"No. But you can't just tell me that there's no way that it'll work out between us."

"It won't. The Erica that you're in love with is from a different time. To the Erica of your time, you're nothing more than a pleasant memory."

"And how do you know that?" Kai angrily asks. "Did you ask her? Or Dr. Tom? Did any of you think about what it'd be like before you decided to use her to get me to do what I was supposed to do?"

"No we didn't ask her but I can assure you that Erica Strange is not pining for you Kai. She's moved on with her life, she accepted that whatever you had together for that period of time is over and I think it's best if you accept that fact and move on as well."

There's finality in Dr Fred's voice that Kai doesn't like but he decides not to push it. He hangs onto the sliver of hope that maybe somewhere out there Erica still feels the same way about him that he does for her. Even if for her there's a decade between the last time he saw her from the stage at Goblins.

"He had no right to do what he did without consulting anyone. He could have easily set back Erica's therapy. Not to mention jeopardizing the therapy of his own patient."

Tom's voice is full of barely restrained rage and before Naadiah can say anything about it, Arthur speaks first.

"Tom what Fred did was highly unusual but he didn't do it on his own. I gave him the permission to reach out to Erica. Naadiah and I felt that it would be beneficial to both Erica and Kai."

"Why wasn't I informed?"

"We thought it was best to see how things played out. As it is, this proves that Erica is more than ready for group therapy," Naadiah patiently says.

"And what about the ramifications about playing with both of their emotions?"

"No one's emotions were played with," Naadiah answers.

"Allowing Kai and Erica to develop feelings for one another can jeopardize everything that we do here."

"You're over-reacting Tom," Naadiah retorts.

Tom steps out of Arthur's office and leaves the other two doctors by themselves. Naadiah looks at Arthur full of doubt.

"Did we do the right thing?"

Arthur gives her a shrug in response, "Only time will tell."

Kai wonders just how pathetic he's become and when did he become some teenage girl with an impossible crush. He sighs as he closes his laptop after another Google search on Erica. All he's been able to determine is that she's become a successful publisher. There's nothing about her personal life. In the few photos that he's been able to find of her, she's always with her partner. There's nothing about Ethan or any other man who might be in her life. For all he knows, she could be in a relationship with her business partner.

He's unsuccessfully tried to use a few of his regrets to go see her but Dr Fred always manages to cut his attempts short. He just wants to see her. And although it'd be easy enough to look her up and show up at her door, Kai wants to honor her request of not looking her up in his now.

Erica stares at the positive test result and for the first time in a very long time, she feels completely hopeless. She's not sure what she should do; nothing in therapy has prepared her for _this_ new obstacle. The funny thing is that she doesn't regret a single thing. She's either learned to not dwell on the past or she truly feels there's nothing to regret about having spent one night with Kai. Even though she's content with Adam, and she really does care about Adam, there's a Kai-shaped hole in her heart that Adam can't even begin to fill. Not that she had ever wanted Adam to fill that space, she was happy with Adam and what they shared.

She's pregnant and that's going to change everything in her life. And the worse thing about the whole situation isn't that it'll most likely ruin things between her and Adam. No, the worse thing about it is the fact that Kai will never get to be there for something that should be so special in both of their lives.

Disaster strikes and Kai's first response is to reach out to Erica. He doesn't care right now about his promise to her. All he needs to know is that she's okay and that she's survived this nightmare. Yet he can't seem to find her, everywhere he searches leads to a dead end. No one connected to her seems to be available. Or they're too wrapped up in their own personal search to give some stranger, a famous rock star but still a stranger, the time of day. He starts to fear for the worse and he can't even put the worse into words.

All Kai can think is that this wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to have their happy ending no matter how fucked up things were right now because of therapy and time travel, he had always known that he and Erica were going to be together in the end. She wasn't going to wind up being some unfixable regret on a list in Dr Fred's office. And he wasn't going to end up being nothing more than a distant but pleasant memory of her past.

Now he's not sure what to do. Life's supposed to go on and Dr Fred wants him to continue with his therapy but in the aftermath of everything going back to normal Kai is stuck in a holding pattern. He's afraid to move forward until he knows that she's all right, that the _worse_ hasn't come to reality.

What's the point of therapy if he can't save her?

Her skin tastes like heaven and the way that she moves with him makes him wish that they could just freeze time and stay in this moment forever. He wants to know why they can't when she looks up at him, her eyes wide with her pupils blown in desire. If they have the ability to travel in time, why can't they just stop time, hold it back and keep this moment to themselves forever.

Erica shifts against him and all thoughts of the mechanics of time are lost to him. Kai leans down to kiss her and she arches up into him.

There are several moments in Erica's life that she doesn't regret, no matter how much pain they caused. Telling Adam about the baby was one of them. He had left the apartment in a fit of rage and hadn't returned for two days. She could understand where his anger was coming from but at the same time there was a part of her that realized that what she had shared with Adam would always be second best to what she had shared with Kai. There had been more equality in her relationship with Kai, even when he had been busy pushing her away with both hands because he didn't want to cope with the realities with therapy. And even when she had been trying to hang onto Ethan, too afraid to see the writing on the wall, she and Kai had been on the same foot.

She can't quite say the same for her and Adam. There had been a constrained resentment when he had found out that she had passed onto the next phase with flying colours. He had been in group therapy for far longer than she had been and he had failed whereas Erica hadn't even really stumbled during her test. From that moment onwards, there had been a division in their relationship. Dr Tom had sent her out to find her first patient and Adam had stayed on in group therapy trying to learn what he hadn't learned. And even if Adam hadn't actually taken it out on her, he had closed her out of that part of his life, telling her that one doctor was more than enough.

Erica couldn't see Kai ever doing that. Shutting her out because he resented her. This time Erica saw the writing on the wall and read it.

He's three blocks from her apartment and he toys with the idea of going there. Of showing up at her doorstep again and just begging for her to let him fall into her arms again. It's been a year (in his timeline at least) since he last saw her. He's found out that she's survived the disaster in Toronto that his worse case scenario hadn't been a reality and he regrets telling her about what her future might have held for her.

Kai starts to make his way to her apartment; his own regret can wait for a little while longer. What he has with her is far more important than fixing something so trivial as his regret. He's not even sure what he'll say to her when he shows up at her door. Kai can't remember if it's a year or two in her timeline since he last saw her, since they fell into her bed together.

Her apartment is two blocks away and it's then when he runs into Dr Tom. Kai knows just how this man feels about him, feels about him being in Erica's life and there had been a time when Kai probably would have just told him off or punched him before making his way to Erica's door, but now he knows better.

"Do you think that showing up in her life every now and then is a good idea? I know that you care about her Kai but is complicating her life just so you can hang onto something is worth it?"

"I don't know," Kai admits. "Are you telling me to turn around?"

"Not at all," Dr Tom sadly says. "I'm just reminding you that actions have consequences. Do you even know who Erica is at this point in her life? It's been about two years since you last saw her, do you think that Erica's the same Erica as the one that you bonded with that summer?"

"So what should I do?" Kai asks.

"That's not my decision to make. I just think that before you disrupt her life again, that you think about what that could do to her and to you."

Dr Tom leaves and Kai stands there for a few moments, inertia holding him still. The last time had seen her; only a few months had gone by since they had last seen one another in Goblins. This time it's been a few years. Kai thinks that just because he's been unable to move one doesn't mean that Erica hasn't. Her publishing company hasn't become a success in his timeline because she's sitting on her couch, crying her heart out for him. (Not that Kai can even picture Erica crying over him but still the sentiment's the only one he can think of that fits what he's feeling.)

He turns around and heads back in the direction that will take him back to finishing reliving his regret. Erica doesn't need him to keep barging into her life over and over again. She was right to tell him not to look her up in the future. What they have has been complicated by the delicacy of time travel.

Kai returns home, another regret successful and one diverted (he realizes now that if he had ignored Dr Tom that he would have regretted his actions.) He thinks that maybe he should just grow a pair and seek her out in his timeline. The worse that can happen is that she'll slam her door in his face and he's had that happen before. This time he's not bearing bad news about her possible future. This time he'd be asking to be in her life during a timeline that wouldn't complicate things as much as they could if he had knocked at her door when he was reliving his regret.

There are times when Erica wonders how she'll ever make it through raising a child on her own. Her family have supported her even if they don't understand the whole situation and it's not as if she can open up to them about time travel and therapy and everything else that has led to her daughter. And it's not as if she can even contact Kai and tell him about their daughter. If she tries to contact the Kai of now, well he'd probably think she was crazy and she can't contact her Kai either, it wouldn't be fair to him to shove this onto his shoulders, not when he can't do anything about it.

There's a letter on his doormat and Kai gets an odd sensation when he picks it up. For a moment, he almost doesn't open it. In the early days of Head back when they were just becoming an overnight success, he had had to deal with stalkers. Fans who thought that they had a deep connection with him based on the words he sang. Yet as he stares at the cream-coloured envelope, Kai doesn't think that this is from some obsessed fan.

He sits down on his sofa and he holds the letter in his hands and he debates about opening it. He thinks that he recognizes the handwriting as Erica's but it has been so long since he saw her handwriting. He wonders if he opens it will he regret it or will he be disappointed?

The letter was to the point, void of any platitudes; almost as if Erica had written it with the expectation that Kai would reject her, reject _them_. And how could she know that all of his roads always led him back to her door? Since that last time, he had avoided her, resisted the temptation to show up at her door. And now their timelines had finally verged into one timeline and he was suddenly afraid. He knew what he wanted to do but he wasn't sure if he was stable enough to do what he wanted to. This had nothing to do with what he was supposed to do.

The house is lovely. Kai finds himself thinking that it suits her as he sits in the black car across the street and watches. He feels a little creepy and for once he wishes that Dr Tom would materialize out of thin air and tell him how to proceed. But he's beyond needing a doctor to guide him through his life. This time it's sink or swim and he's doing it without a safety net. Kai laughs when he realizes how ridiculous he's being. He's sitting in a car, like a nervous teenager, because he's afraid that Erica's going to reject him.

She'd sent him a letter welcoming him into her life, into the life of their child, if he wanted it and here he is terrified she's going to slam the door in his face. Before he can even get out of the car, she's walked out of her house and is across the street. She slides into the passenger seat and looks at him. Kai thinks she's just as beautiful now as she was that long ago summer that should never have happened but somehow did.

"Hi."

He hadn't realized just how much he'd missed her voice until that moment.

"Hi."

"So I was wondering just how long you were going to sit out here before you came to the door. And then I decided that I'd better come out."

She looks away from him and stares at the road in front of the car and Kai is suddenly tongue-tied. He's not sure what to say to her.

"Look maybe the letter was a bad idea but I though that you had a right to know," Erica tells him.

"It wasn't a bad idea. It's just a lot to process," Kai reassures her. "I was just sitting here trying to figure out what to say once I walked up to your door."

She shifts in the seat so she's facing him and Kai decides that maybe this is the moment that he'd like to extend forever. Erica cups his jaw with her hand and she rests her forehead against his.

"Want to go inside?"

"Yes."

It comes out as a whisper but it doesn't stop her from brushing her lips against his. This is the moment that he's been waiting for since he finally let her into his life during that golden summer at Goblins that he had the chance to relive. Kai sighs as he deepens their kiss. It doesn't matter that they're sitting in a car, in the middle of a quiet residential neighbourhood; all that matters is that they're finally together again. And this time, they won't be pulled apart because he's from her future and she's from his past.

Erica pulls away with a smile.

"Come on inside, there's someone else who'd like to meet you."

She slips out of the car and walks to the driver's side where she pulls open the door and extends her hand to him. He lets her pull him out of the car and hand in hand they walk towards the house where their shared future awaits them.

((END))


End file.
